


You Take My Breath Away

by islasands



Series: Lambski [61]
Category: Adam Lambert (Musician)
Genre: Audiences, Lovers, M/M, Music, artist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-16
Updated: 2012-07-16
Packaged: 2017-11-10 02:09:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/461095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/islasands/pseuds/islasands
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is my response to Adam singing with Queen. It's about his singing, his love of music, and his love for the man who sat in the balcony, all heart eyed, and watched and listened. </p><p>And it's my response to Queen. I love the song I have included. I love the drama in Freddie's singing. </p><p>All up the past weeks with Queen have taken my breath away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Take My Breath Away

"You Take My Breath Away"

  


Queen

  


 

 

While the singer was singing he was, in fact, immersed in the silence of a stone’s interior. His voice, falling into the pool of the audience, had the same effect as that of a stone cast in a river’s pause; something was set in motion, something moved outwards, but it moved in circular rather than straight lines. The emotions of the audience were dilated and darkened much like the pupils in the eyes of lovers. They ran out of them like ripples. And the singer controlled the placement of each vocal throw, and therefore each concentric flow of oscillating feelings, with uncanny precision. If anyone had asked him how he did it, how his timing was so consistently accurate, he would not have been able to explain. So much of his art was involuntary. It went something like this. The tendrils of his intuition reached out to measure and interpret the energy levels of the audience. Those calculations in turn fed into his emotional algorithms for assessing the most perfect alignments of lyric and melody. Then he threw himself, the body of himself as a man of feeling, into his voice and into their ears. 

Nor could he have explained that what made it possible for him to pilot the emotional flight of an audience was in part due to his brain being like the cabin of an aircraft. Every surface of his thought processes was encrusted with devices used for measuring the distance, height and speed of affectivity. His neurons seemed to have been wired with a peculiar empathy that was almost architectural in its musical expression. He carefully and deliberately built those pivotal moments of psychical grace, - sadness, joy, splendor, even the unruly exuberance of a child - that music can engender in an audience. He laid the foundation courses of intersubjectivity - those strange connections between audience and artist - then raised upon them simply constructed yet seemingly miraculous houses for emotion. He raised up their walls, arches, ceilings, atriums, and great double-leaved doors with the sounds that came out of his mouth. And he did it like a workman. He did it because it happened to be his job. He did it as his honest day’s work, no less, no more, and after he finished up, like any other workman he went home. 

And yes, that isn’t quite the whole truth. His innate scepticism and fatalism played an important part in his singing. They tempered the blade of his talent, kept it sharp and free from the dulling effect of sentimentality. And truth be told, his stage presence, his ability to be in the moment of a song, owed as much to his streak of ruthlessness as it did to his agreement with a song’s intention. He could sing of joy, sorrow, love or lust when they were furtherest from his mind. And he often did. His mind sometimes wandered at the very moment when his voice was conveying depths or heights of emotion. But then even pilots, steering their ships through the sky, take time to wonder what is for lunch, or whether the stain on a shirt will come out in the wash, or whether he should say something about the co-pilot’s body odor.

Which is not to say that he himself, while engaged in entertaining an audience, was not occasionally truly swept up in the emotion of a song. Yes, it sometimes happened. Recently, for example, he had been singing a song that included the line “I’ve fallen in love” and it so happened that he had done this very thing - fallen in love - and was still doing it. It was a very happy coincidence of song lyric and real life. And so he happily infused the lyric with some of his actual joy and aimed the stone of it, with himself at its heart, at the balcony of the theatre where the object of his affection was sitting. It was an easy, theatrical, gesture to make, and he was aware of this fact, as was his lover, and later, after the show, they doubtless would joke about it. 

But what really happened, when he went home after his day’s work, is that he watched his lover undressing, surveyed the territory of his flesh with the pang of seeing the land where he felt most at home, most accepted for his plain and ordinary self, pulled him close when he laid down next to him, reveled in the shivery impact of his bare skin against his own, looked into his eyes with the intense questioning that comes from already knowing the answer by heart, kissed his lips with the hesitancy that is precursory to passion, and then pulled away briefly, averting his face, trying to catch his breath. “You take my breath away,” he said. 

And the odd thing is, if the singer but knew it, that is exactly how audiences felt as they looked and listened and felt the naked truth of the man singing to them. He simply took their breath away.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> "You Take My Breath Away"
> 
> Words and music by Freddie Mercury
> 
> Oooh oooh take it take it all away  
> Oooh ooh take my breath away  
> Oooh ooh yoooo take my breath away
> 
> Look into my eyes and you'll see I'm the only one  
> You've captured my love stolen my heart  
> Changed my life  
> Every time you make a move you destroy my mind  
> And the way you touch  
> I lose control and shiver deep inside  
> You take my breath away
> 
> You can reduce me to tears with a single sigh  
> Ev'ry breath that you take  
> Any sound that you make is a whisper in my ear  
> I could give up all my life for just one kiss  
> I would surely die if you dismiss me from your love  
> You take my breath away
> 
> So please don't go  
> Don't leave me here all by myself  
> I get ever so lonely from time to time  
> I will find you anywhere you go  
> I'll be right behind you  
> Right until the ends of the earth  
> I'll get no sleep till I find you  
> To tell you that you just take my breath away
> 
> I will find you anywhere you go  
> Right until the ends of the earth  
> I'll get no sleep until I find you  
> To tell you when I've found you  
> I love you
> 
> You take my breath take my breath ... away


End file.
